PDE Practice Exam 2 — 20 Questions

Question 1

Your team uses Looker Studio to build dashboards on top of BigQuery. The dashboards are slow when filtering on a high-cardinality dimension (e.g., user ID). You want to improve performance without changing the underlying BigQuery table design. Which action should you take?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Enable BigQuery BI Engine on the project.. BI Engine automatically caches the BigQuery tables in memory for Looker Studio, accelerating queries on any dimension. Enabling BI Engine on the project will improve dashboard performance.

Answer

Create a clustered table on the user ID column.

Answer

Apply a filter to limit data to the last month only.

Answer

Use Looker Studio's extract data functionality.

Question 2

A company wants to track data lineage for their BigQuery tables to understand how data flows from source to derived tables. Which TWO Google Cloud services can be used to capture and visualize data lineage? (Choose 2.)

Accepted Answer

Dataplex Data Lineage. Dataplex provides a comprehensive Data Lineage feature that automatically captures lineage for BigQuery jobs. Additionally, the BigQuery Lineage API (part of Data Catalog) allows you to retrieve lineage programmatically.

Answer

Vertex AI Feature Store

Answer

Cloud Composer

Answer

Cloud Data Fusion

Question 3

A data pipeline processes sensitive customer data. You need to ensure that only authorised users can query the data in BigQuery, and that the data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Which THREE steps should you take? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Create authorised views in BigQuery to restrict access to sensitive columns. Encryption at rest is enabled by default with CMEK or CSEK. In-transit encryption is default for BigQuery. Authorised views provide fine-grained access control. IAM roles control dataset access.

Answer

Use a Cloud VPN to encrypt data in transit between on-premises and Google Cloud

Answer

Grant the bigquery.dataViewer role at the dataset level to all users

Question 4

A Dataflow pipeline is processing a high-volume streaming data stream. The job is lagging behind by 30 minutes, and the Dataflow monitoring UI shows high system latency with low CPU utilization. Which action should be taken to improve throughput?

Accepted Answer

Enable Dataflow Shuffle. High system latency with low CPU utilization indicates a bottleneck in data shuffling, not in processing capacity. Enabling Dataflow Shuffle offloads the shuffle operation to Google-managed resources, reducing disk I/O and network overhead, which directly improves throughput in streaming pipelines.

Answer

Enable Streaming Engine

Answer

Increase the number of workers

Answer

Disable hot key detection

Question 5

A data scientist developed a model using custom training on Vertex AI. They want to automate the entire training-to-deployment process. Which service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Vertex AI Pipelines. Vertex AI Pipelines is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed, serverless orchestration service specifically designed to automate ML workflows, including custom training, hyperparameter tuning, evaluation, and deployment. It integrates natively with Vertex AI services and supports Kubeflow Pipelines SDK or TFX for defining reproducible, end-to-end pipelines, making it the ideal solution for automating the entire training-to-deployment process.

Answer

Cloud Composer

Answer

Cloud Build

Answer

Cloud Functions

Question 6

A company uses BigQuery and wants to reduce query costs by using BI Engine for Looker Studio dashboards. The data is stored in a BigQuery dataset with 5 TB of frequently accessed tables. The dashboards run dozens of concurrent queries. What is the recommended approach to enable BI Engine acceleration?

Accepted Answer

Create a reservation in the Administration panel and assign it to the project.. BI Engine is a reserved capacity service that caches data in memory. You must reserve capacity (amount of memory) for a specific BigQuery region, and then BI Engine automatically accelerates queries from Looker Studio and other BI tools. It does not require you to grant specific IAM roles to users (they just need BigQuery permissions) or to create materialized views. You do not need to enable it per dataset; it works at the project/region level.

Answer

Enable BI Engine by setting the dataset option 'enable_bi_engine=TRUE' in the dataset metadata.

Answer

Grant all Looker Studio users the 'biengine.user' IAM role on the project.

Answer

Create materialized views of the tables and connect Looker Studio to the views.

Question 7

A company is using Looker to explore their BigQuery data. They have defined a LookML model with an 'explore' that joins two views: 'orders' and 'customers'. The join is a left join. They want to ensure that only customers with orders are shown when exploring. Which LookML parameter should they modify?

Accepted Answer

Change the join type from 'left_outer' to 'inner'. The 'join_type' parameter in LookML defines the join type. Changing it to 'inner' will exclude customers without orders.

Answer

Set the 'required_joins' parameter on the 'orders' view

Answer

Use a derived table with a WHERE clause

Answer

Add a filter in the 'customers' view to exclude nulls

Question 8

You need to build a Looker model that joins multiple tables from BigQuery. Which LookML object defines the relationship between tables?

Accepted Answer

EXPLORE. In LookML, an EXPLORE defines the starting point and joins to other views. A VIEW defines a single table or derived table. A MODEL contains explores and views. A JOIN is not a top-level object; joins are defined inside explores.

Answer

JOIN

Answer

VIEW

Answer

MODEL

Question 9

A data scientist wants to automate retraining of a classification model when new labeled data arrives. The model is deployed on AI Platform Prediction. Which Google Cloud service should be used to orchestrate the retraining pipeline?

Accepted Answer

AI Platform Pipelines. AI Platform Pipelines (now Vertex AI Pipelines) is the correct service because it provides a fully managed, serverless orchestration engine for building, deploying, and running machine learning pipelines. It integrates with Kubeflow Pipelines and TensorFlow Extended (TFX) to automate the retraining workflow when new labeled data arrives, enabling continuous training and model versioning without manual intervention.

Answer

AI Platform Prediction

Answer

AI Platform Continuous Evaluation

Answer

Cloud Dataflow

Question 10

Your company has a machine learning model that predicts customer churn. The model is deployed on Vertex AI Endpoints with autoscaling. After a marketing campaign, traffic to the endpoint increases by 10x. Some predictions start failing with 'HTTP 503 Service Unavailable' errors. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The autoscaling configuration has insufficient maximum nodes to handle the traffic.. A 503 Service Unavailable error from Vertex AI Endpoints indicates that the endpoint is overwhelmed and cannot handle the incoming request volume. With a 10x traffic spike and autoscaling configured, the most likely cause is that the autoscaling configuration has insufficient maximum nodes, so the endpoint cannot scale out enough to handle the load, causing requests to be rejected.

Answer

The model container has a memory leak.

Answer

The model's accuracy has degraded due to data drift.

Answer

The model is using an older version that is not supported.

Question 11

A company has a production machine learning model deployed on Vertex AI Endpoint that predicts customer churn. The model is retrained weekly using a Vertex AI Pipeline that pulls new data from BigQuery. Recently, the model's accuracy has been declining. The data science team suspects data drift but is unsure. They have enabled Vertex AI Model Monitoring but have not set up any alerts. The team wants to diagnose and address the issue quickly. The pipeline runs successfully, and no errors are reported. The model endpoint is serving predictions with average latency of 200ms. What should the team do first?

Accepted Answer

Review Vertex AI Model Monitoring drift reports and set up alerts for significant drift. The team has already enabled Vertex AI Model Monitoring, which automatically tracks feature distributions and prediction statistics over time. The first diagnostic step should be to review the drift reports generated by Model Monitoring to confirm whether data drift is occurring, and then set up alerts so the team is proactively notified of significant drift in the future. This directly addresses the suspected root cause without unnecessary operational changes.

Answer

Immediately trigger a retraining pipeline with more recent data

Answer

Increase the number of replicas to reduce latency

Answer

Examine Cloud Logging for prediction errors

Question 12

Which Google Cloud service is a fully managed relational database for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, offering automatic replication and backups?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL. Cloud SQL is the correct answer because it is Google Cloud's fully managed relational database service that supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. It provides automatic replication across zones and automated backups, making it the ideal choice for traditional relational database workloads without the need for manual administration.

Answer

Cloud Spanner

Answer

AlloyDB

Answer

Bigtable

Question 13

A financial services company deploys a fraud detection model on Vertex AI using a custom prediction container that runs a PyTorch model. The model requires GPU acceleration. The deployment succeeds but predictions return an error: 'CUDA error: out of memory'. What should the team do to resolve this issue?

Accepted Answer

Increase the GPU machine type to one with more memory (e.g., from NVIDIA T4 to A100). The CUDA out-of-memory error indicates that the GPU's VRAM is insufficient to load the PyTorch model or process the inference batch. Increasing the GPU machine type to one with more memory, such as from an NVIDIA T4 (16 GB) to an A100 (40 or 80 GB), directly resolves the capacity issue. Vertex AI prediction endpoints allow you to select different accelerator types and sizes, and this change ensures the model fits within GPU memory.

Answer

Change the container to use a CPU-only image to avoid CUDA errors

Answer

Enable Vertex AI Model Monitoring to automatically scale the endpoint

Answer

Add CPU replicas to distribute the inferencing load

Question 14

You are designing a batch data pipeline that runs daily to ingest data from an on-premises database into BigQuery. The ingestion volume is approximately 50 GB per day. The data must be available in BigQuery by 6 AM each day. The on-premises database supports change data capture (CDC) via logs. Which approach minimizes operational cost and complexity?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Dataflow with a JDBC source in batch mode to read CDC logs and write to BigQuery. Using Dataflow with a JDBC source to read CDC logs in batch mode is straightforward and cost-effective for daily 50 GB loads. Dataproc could also work but requires cluster management. Pub/Sub with Dataflow would be more complex and costly for a daily batch. Data Fusion adds a visual layer but is overkill for this simple batch ingestion.

Answer

Use Cloud Dataproc with Spark Streaming to ingest CDC logs

Answer

Use Pub/Sub with a Dataflow streaming pipeline

Answer

Use Cloud Data Fusion with a batch pipeline

Question 15

Your company ingests millions of events per second into a Pub/Sub topic. The downstream consumer must process events with minimal latency and high throughput. However, the consumer occasionally falls behind during traffic spikes, and you need to ensure no data loss while minimizing costs. Which subscription type and configuration should you choose?

Accepted Answer

Pull subscription with flow control settings. Pull subscriptions allow the subscriber to control the throughput by batching messages and setting flow control, which is ideal for high-throughput scenarios. Using a pull subscription with exactly-once delivery (if available) or at-least-once combined with idempotent processing ensures no data loss. Push subscriptions have limitations on throughput and are not suitable for millions of events per second.

Answer

Push subscription with a load balancer

Answer

Push subscription with endpoint on Cloud Run

Answer

Pull subscription with exactly-once delivery disabled

Question 16

A company is using Dataflow to stream data from Cloud Pub/Sub to BigQuery. The pipeline includes a custom ParDo transformation that enriches the data with external API calls. The pipeline is experiencing high latency and occasional failures due to API timeouts. What strategy should be employed to improve reliability and performance?

Accepted Answer

Use a DoFn with stateful processing and batch API calls using asynchronous HTTP client.. Using a DoFn with stateful processing and an asynchronous HTTP client allows the pipeline to batch API calls and handle timeouts without blocking the main processing thread. This reduces latency by enabling concurrent requests and improves reliability through retry logic and state management, which is essential for external API enrichment in Dataflow.

Answer

Remove the enrichment step and store raw data in BigQuery.

Answer

Use a global window to accumulate all data before enrichment.

Answer

Increase the number of workers to parallelize API calls.

Question 17

A user gets the above error when trying to get online predictions. The model was created and the endpoint exists. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

No version of the model is deployed to the endpoint.. The error 'No version of the model is deployed to the endpoint' occurs when the endpoint exists but has no active model version assigned to it. In Google Cloud AI Platform (Vertex AI), an endpoint must have at least one deployed model version to serve predictions. Without a deployed version, the endpoint cannot handle inference requests, even though the endpoint resource exists.

Answer

The endpoint does not exist.

Answer

The endpoint is in a different region than the model.

Answer

The model does not exist.

Question 18

You are using BigQuery ML to train a matrix factorization model for a recommendation system. The training data consists of user-item interactions. You notice that the model is overfitting. Which of the following hyperparameter changes would most likely reduce overfitting?

Accepted Answer

Increase w_reg (regularization weight) from 0.1 to 0.5. Increasing the L2 regularization weight (w_reg) penalizes large weights and reduces overfitting. Increasing number of factors (num_factors) increases model complexity, worsening overfitting. Decreasing learning rate may help but not as directly as regularization.

Answer

Decrease w_reg (regularization weight) from 0.1 to 0.01

Answer

Increase num_factors from 10 to 20

Answer

Increase num_training_iterations from 10 to 20

Question 19

A financial services company runs a batch Dataflow pipeline daily to process transaction data. The pipeline reads from Cloud Storage, performs complex transformations, and writes to BigQuery. Recently, the pipeline has been failing intermittently with the error: 'Workflow failed. Causes: (9c3f7a2b1d4e): The worker missed 2000 data samples in the last 30 seconds. This can be caused by a variety of factors, including slow work items, network issues, or resource contention.' The team has already increased the number of workers and tried using e2-standard-8 machine types, but the issue persists. The pipeline processes approximately 500 GB of data per run and uses approximately 200 workers. The team suspects that the issue might be related to shuffle operations. What should the team do next to resolve the issue?

Accepted Answer

Increase the persistent disk size per worker to 100 GB.. The error indicates that workers are missing data samples due to slow shuffle operations, often caused by insufficient disk I/O. Increasing the persistent disk size per worker to 100 GB provides more local scratch space for Dataflow's shuffle, reducing disk contention and allowing the shuffle to complete within the 30-second window. This directly addresses the root cause without changing the worker count or machine type.

Answer

Enable Streaming Engine for the pipeline.

Answer

Reduce the number of workers to 100 to decrease shuffle overhead.

Answer

Use Cloud Storage as a shuffle sink.

Question 20

You need to analyze customer churn and want to understand the rank of each customer's churn probability within their subscription plan. Which BigQuery window function computes the relative ranking from 1 (highest probability) to N?

Accepted Answer

RANK(). RANK() assigns a rank with gaps for ties; DENSE_RANK() assigns consecutive ranks; ROW_NUMBER() assigns unique sequential numbers; NTILE() divides into buckets. For relative ranking with ties, RANK() is typically used for 'rank' meaning.

Answer

DENSE_RANK()

Answer

NTILE(100)

Answer

ROW_NUMBER()